It seems City Hall took delivery of 30 or 40 oxygen canisters early this AM. Daley is in full hyperventilation mode, blaming guns guns guns and attempting to ram through a whole bunch of delaying tactics or blatantly illegal ordinances that will accomplish nothing but wasting taxpayer dollars - which as we all know are few and far between nowadays.

Give it up Shanks - we can't protect everyone all the time and you are actively seeking to create more casualties as the city spirals into Detroit II. Give law abiding citizens a fair chance to defend themselves, their loved ones and their property.

GM; if I remember correctly you are a police officer and your wife is also, or at least if I remember, she is in training.

From a law enforcement perspective, I would be curious about your thoughts on the issue of CCW's. Here in LA it is near impossible, but my question is, are you in favor of the general public being able to have a CCW permit? Of course I assumea general background check and certain exclusions, but within general limits, as an Officer of the Law,are you in favor of CCW's being widely held and issued?

Also, do you think the recent ruling will make CCW's easier to obtain?

I am a strong advocate for law abiding citizens to be able to carry. The vast majority of working cops take this stance as we are well aware that American law enforcement, as pro-active as we might try to be, are basically stuck responding to crime after the fact. We are not omniscient, and certainly not omnipresent. Bottom line, you are responsible for protecting yourself and your family.

Woof, I've always known that the Second Amendment was an individual right to keep and bear arms; Am I that much smarter than the Supremes? Yawn, I'm going back to sleep now...with my gun under the pillow. P.C.

Otis McDonald thought he needed a gun. Not just any gun. Something more agile than his hunting shotguns. Something to deter the seedy element that had, over the years, infected his Chicago neighborhood with drugs and crime from threatening his life and breaking into his home yet again. He thought he needed a handgun. But city laws that effectively banned handgun possession by private citizens stood in his way.

Two years ago, McDonald agreed to be the lead plaintiff in a case orchestrated to challenge those laws as violations of the Second Amendment. The lawsuit began the very day the Supreme Court laid the constitutional groundwork for it in District of Columbia v. Heller, a decision it announced after a nearly 70-year hiatus from Second Amendment jurisprudence. In Heller, a five-to-four decision in which the justices split along familiar philosophical lines, the Court struck down a Washington, DC, ordinance that, among other things, banned handguns. It held that the Second Amendment includes the right of individuals to possess firearms, including handguns, at home for self-defense. But because Heller involved federal law, the case left open the question of whether the Second Amendment affects state and local government action. Most, but not all, of the Bill of Rights' protections do.

(Table)

View this table:[in this window][in a new window]

Number of Murders and Justifiable Homicides Committed with Handguns.

We now have the answer. On June 28, in another five-to-four decision that mirrored the Heller voting, the Court held in McDonald v. Chicago that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment "incorporated" the right described in Heller. Over the past 50 years, the Court has used that clause to extend enumerated federal rights, and a plurality of justices followed that approach in this case. The "right to keep and bear arms for the purpose of self-defense" is now "fully applicable" to the states. The case shifts the constitutional landscape, and its five opinions — collectively clocking in at over 200 pages — illustrate sharp divisions in the justices' views of history, the judicial role, and constitutional law.

Justice Samuel Alito's plurality opinion, referencing a physician-assisted–suicide case, explained that the right described in Heller is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition"1 and is "among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty." Justice Clarence Thomas's concurrence, which no other justice joined, argued that a different phrase within the Fourteenth Amendment, the Privileges or Immunities Clause, created the better analytic framework for deciding the scope of the right to keep and bear arms. Although McDonald and his fellow petitioners favored that approach, the plurality passed on the opportunity, which would have required disturbing a line of cases that dates to the post–Civil War period. (If the petitioners' goal was to convince the Court to revive that theory — and they devoted nearly their entire 72-page brief to arguing for it — they won the battle but lost the war.) Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia wrote for themselves in dueling opinions. Justice Stevens's dissent, the coda to his career, offered a fluid view of "liberty" and suggested that a focus on "deeply rooted" rights was flawed, since it could sanction racist laws. And in a characteristically biting concurrence, Justice Scalia dismantled Justice Stevens's approach and lambasted certain "liberty" cases, such as those addressing abortion and gay rights, as unconstrained exercises in judicial lawmaking in which judges impose their moral values and, consequently, undercut democracy.

Justice Stephen Breyer, in an impassioned dissent that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor joined, proffered a states'-rights view usually embraced by the Court's conservative wing and argued that Heller should be overturned, or at least not extended. In his view, the Court "should not look to history alone," especially in cases like this one, for which the historical record is mixed, in its decision making — it should "consider the basic values that underlie a constitutional provision and their contemporary significance" as well as "the relevant consequences and practical justifications" of a decision.

Like Justice Breyer, physicians are well aware that esoteric questions of constitutional law may have real-world implications. Gun violence is a major public health concern, resulting in more than 30,000 deaths and about twice as many injuries annually. The cost of gun violence is prohibitive. Scholars estimate that its yearly total tops $100 billion.2 Handguns are particularly troubling. Research links their presence to substantially increased risks of suicide and homicide, especially for women living in abusive settings. And for children, "gun safety" is an oxymoron. To the extent that McDonald means more handguns, physicians have reason to be concerned. But any hysteria that this case inspires should, for the moment, be tempered.

In the aftermath of Heller, many in the public health community worried that the decision would unleash a torrent of guns on the public, bringing sudden, high spikes in rates of injury and death. Though it is too early to be completely reassured, dire predictions have not yet been realized. Heller did not create an unfettered right. As the Court explained in that opinion, it is "not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose." Thus far, it has not given lower courts a license to annihilate gun-control laws; in the more than 200 post-Heller federal and state cases, courts have left the legal status quo largely intact.3 Perhaps coincidentally, recent rates of violent crime have been at historic lows.

Conventional wisdom suggests that, even after McDonald, most gun-control laws will withstand scrutiny. In the Court`s view, its decision "does not imperil every law regulating firearms," and quoting Heller, it perceives no threat to "such longstanding regulatory measures as 'prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill,' 'laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.'" Total handgun bans will probably fall — and their effectiveness is uncertain in any event — but otherwise the impact of this sea change in constitutional law may be modest. Still, it will be years, even decades, before that conclusion is clear. And the possibility of more guns in homes, especially handguns, is troubling, as is the lack of guidance the Court's opinion offered to lower courts. For their part, physicians should remain vigilant and address gun issues, such as access and storage, with patients, especially those who may be suicidal, have survived domestic violence, or live with children. We can only hope that in hindsight, bleak post-Heller, post-McDonald forecasts will seem hyperbolic.

Otis McDonald has not won yet. A lower court will now decide whether the laws that thwarted him are constitutional. But McDonald is surely a foothold to victory. In all likelihood, he will get his gun. Ironically, that handgun may not be the panacea he seeks. It will not address the root causes of the drug- and gang-related crime plaguing his neighborhood. Its promise of safety may be illusory, and it may just increase the risks of homicide, suicide, and accidental injury and death of those who live in or, like his grandchildren, visit his home. It may also create legal problems. If he kills a neighborhood thug in self-defense, the odds that he will be held blameless are slim: in every year from 2004 through 2008, less than 2.5% of handgun-related killings by private citizens were deemed justifiable homicides.4 McDonald has, however, secured a measure of immortality; he will forever be associated with the case that bears his name.

That case marks another installment in high-minded constitutional debates. But we should not forget that the collateral damage from firearms, especially handguns, is breathtaking. In the face of staggering statistics about eminently avoidable gun-related harms, perhaps the wisest play for this newfound constitutional right is not to use it at all.

Disclosure forms provided by the author are available with the full text of this article at NEJM.org.

Woof, Well, as I've seen it all along the big gaping logic hole in their argument has been that somehow a right of the people can't be infringe upon by the Federal government but at the same time the state or local governments could infringe at will. If this were true then that would mean that all the other rights of the people listed in the Bill of Rights could be infringed as well because there are no special clauses in there that protects the rest of our rights from being nullified by the states or local government. So, if your local city council passed a law banning churches within city limits that would be fine with these justices? Like I've said before, the enemy is within the gates. P.C.

Ask anyone on the street. They'll tell you the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a liberal organization. During the dark days of the Bush Administration, membership doubled because so many Americans feared increasing restrictions on their civil liberties. If you were to ask liberals to list their top five complaints about the Bush Administration, and they would invariably say the words "shredding" and "Constitution" in the same sentence. They might also add "Fourth Amendment" and "due process." It's possible they'll talk about "free speech zones" and "habeus corpus."

There's a good chance they will mention, probably in combination with several FCC-prohibited adjectives, former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales.

And while liberals certainly do not argue for lawlessness, and will acknowledge the necessity of certain restrictions, it is generally understood that liberals fight to broadly interpret and expand our rights and to question the necessity and wisdom of any restrictions of them.

Liberals can quote legal precedent, news reports, and exhaustive studies. They can talk about the intentions of the Founders. They can argue at length against the tyranny of the government. And they will, almost without exception, conclude the necessity of respecting, and not restricting, civil liberties.

Except for one: the right to keep and bear arms.

When it comes to discussing the Second Amendment, liberals check rational thought at the door. They dismiss approximately 40% of American households that own one or more guns, and those who fight to protect the Second Amendment, as "gun nuts." They argue for greater restrictions. And they pursue these policies at the risk of alienating voters who might otherwise vote for Democrats.

And they do so in a way that is wholly inconsistent with their approach to all of our other civil liberties.

Those who fight against Second Amendment rights cite statistics about gun violence, as if such numbers are evidence enough that our rights should be restricted. But Chicago and Washington DC, the two cities from which came the most recent Supreme Court decisions on Second Amendment rights, had some of the most restrictive laws in the nation, and also some of the highest rates of violent crime. Clearly, such restrictions do not correlate with preventing crime.

So rather than continuing to fight for greater restrictions on Second Amendment rights, it is time for liberals to defend Second Amendment rights as vigorously as they fight to protect all of our other rights. Because it is by fighting to protect each right that we protect all rights.

And this is why:

(Reasons below the fold)

* ::*

No. 1: The Bill of Rights protects individual rights.

If you've read the Bill of Rights -- and who among us hasn't? -- you will notice a phrase that appears in nearly all of them: "the people."

First Amendment:

...the right of the people peaceably to assemble

Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects...

Ninth Amendment:

...shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people

Tenth Amendment:

...are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Certainly, no good liberal would argue that any of these rights are collective rights, and not individual rights. We believe that the First Amendment is an individual right to criticize our government.

We would not condone a state-regulated news organization. We certainly would not condone state regulation of religion. We talk about "separation of church and state," although there is no mention of "separation of church and state" in the First Amendment.

But we know what they meant. The anti-Federalists refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights; they intended for our rights to be interpreted expansively.

We believe the Founders intended for us to be able to say damn near anything we want, protest damn near anything we want, print damn near anything we want, and believe damn near anything we want. Individually, without the interference or regulation of government.

And yet, despite the recent Heller and McDonald decisions, liberals stumble at the idea of the Second Amendment as an individual right. They take the position that the Founders intended an entirely different meaning by the phrase "the right of the people" in the Second Amendment, even though they are so positively clear about what that phrase means in the First Amendment.

If we can agree that the First Amendment protects not only powerful organizations such as the New York Times or MSNBC, but also the individual commenter on the internet, the individual at the anti-war rally, the individual driving the car with the "Fuck Bush" bumper sticker, can we not also agree that the Second Amendment's use of "the people" has the same meaning?

But it's different! The Second Amendment is talking about the militia! If you want to "bear arms," join the National Guard!

Right?

Wrong.

The United States Militia Code:

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are— (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

Aside from the fact that the National Guard did not exist in the 1700s, the term "militia" does not mean "National Guard," even today. The code clearly states that two classes comprise the militia: the National Guard and Naval Militia, and everyone else.

Everyone else. Individuals. The People.

The Founders well understood that the militia is the people, for it was not only the right but the obligation of all citizens to protect and preserve their liberty and to defend themselves from the tyranny of the government.

And fighting against the tyranny of the government is certainly a liberal value.

No. 2: We oppose restrictions to our civil liberties.

All of our rights, even the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights, are restricted. You can't shout "Fire!" in a crowd. You can't threaten to kill the president. You can't publish someone else's words as your own. We have copyright laws and libel laws and slander laws. We have the FCC to regulate our radio and television content. We have plenty of restrictions on our First Amendment rights.

But we don't like them. We fight them. Any card-carrying member of the ACLU will tell you that while we might agree that certain restrictions are reasonable, we keep a close eye whenever anyone in government gets an itch to pass a new law that restricts our First Amendment rights. Or our Fourth. Or our Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth.

We complain about free speech zones. The whole country is supposed to be a free speech zone, after all. It says so right in the First Amendment.

But when it comes further restrictions on the manufacture, sale, or possession of firearms, liberals are not even silent; they are vociferously in favor of such restrictions.

Suddenly, overly broad restrictions are "reasonable." The Chicago and Washington D.C. bans on handguns -- all handguns -- is reasonable, even though the Supreme Court has now said otherwise.

Would we tolerate such a sweeping regulation of, say, the Thirteenth Amendment?

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

What if a member of Congress -- say, a Republican from a red state in the south -- were to introduce a bill that permits enslaving black women? Would we consider that reasonable? It's not like the law would enslave all people, or even all black people. Just the women. There's no mention of enslaving women in the Thirteenth Amendment. Clearly, when Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he didn't intend to free all the slaves. And we restrict all the other Amendments, so obviously the Thirteenth Amendment is not supposed to be absolute. What's the big deal?

Except that such an argument is ridiculous, of course. Liberals would take to the streets, send angry letters to their representatives in Washington, organize marches, call progressive radio programs to quote, verbatim, the Thirteenth Amendment. Quite bluntly, although not literally, liberals would be up in arms.

And yet...A ban on all handguns seems reasonable to many liberals. Never mind that of 192 million firearms in America, 65 million -- about one third -- are handguns.

Such a narrow interpretation of this particular right is inconsistent with the otherwise broad interpretation of the Bill of Rights. And just as conservatives weaken their own arguments about protecting the Second Amendment when they will not fight as vigilantly for protecting all the others, so too do liberals weaken their arguments for civil liberties, when they pick and choose which civil liberties they deem worthy of defense.

No. 3: It doesn't matter that it's not 1776 anymore.

When the Founders drafted the Bill of Rights, they could not have imagined machine guns. Or armor-piercing bullets (which are not available to the public anyway, and are actually less lethal than conventional ammunition). Or handguns that hold 18 rounds. A drive-by shooting, back in 1776, would have been a guy on a horse with a musket.

Of course, they couldn't have imagined the internet, either. Or 24-hour cable news networks. Or talk radio. When they drafted the First Amendment, did they really mean to protect the rights of Bill O'Reilly to make incredibly stupid, and frequently inaccurate, statements for an entire hour, five nights a week?

Actually, yes. They did. Bill O'Reilly bilious ravings, and Keith Olbermann's Special Comments, and the insipid chatter of the entire cast of the Today show are, and were intended to be, protected by the First Amendment.

Liberals are supposed to understand that just because we don't agree with something doesn't mean it is not protected. At least when it comes to the First Amendment. And one's personal dislike of guns should be no better a reason for fighting against the Second Amendment than should one's personal dislike of Bill O'Reilly justify fighting against the First Amendment.

And yet, when discussing the Second Amendment, liberals become obtuse in their literalism. The Second Amendment does not protect the right to own all guns. Or all ammunition. It doesn't protect the right of the people as individuals.

Liberals will defend the right of Cindy Sheehan to wear an anti-war T-shirt, even though the First Amendment says nothing about T-shirts.

They will defend the rights of alleged terrorists to a public trial, even though the Founders certainly could not have imagined a world in which terrorists would plot to blow up building with airplanes.

But we do not quibble about the methods by which we practice our First Amendment rights because methodology is not the point. Red herring arguments about types of ammunition or magazine capacity or handguns versus rifles are just that -- red herrings. They distract us from the underlying purpose of that right -- to ensure a free society that can hold its government accountable. The Second Amendment is no more about guns than the First Amendment is about quill pens.

No. 4: It doesn't matter if you can use it.

Fine, you say. Have your big, scary guns. It's not like you actually stand a chance in fighting against the United States government. The Army has bigger, badder weapons than any private citizen. Your most deadly gun is no match for their tanks, their helicopters, their atom bombs. Maybe two hundred years ago, citizens stood a chance in a fight against government, but not today. The Second Amendment is obsolete.

Tell that to the Iraqi "insurgents" who are putting up a pretty good fight against our military might with fairly primitive weapons.

The Second Amendment is obsolete?

What other rights might be considered obsolete in today's day and age?

No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

When was the last time a soldier showed up at your door and said, "I'll be staying with you for the indefinite future"?

It's probably been a while. But of course, were it to happen, you'd dust off your Third Amendment and say, "I don't think so, pal."

And you'd be right.

What about the Twenty-Sixth Amendment? How much use does that get?

The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

We all know the youth vote is typically pretty abysmal. Those lazy kids can barely get out of bed before noon, let alone get themselves to the voting booth. If they're not going to use their Twenty-Sixth Amendment rights, shouldn't we just delete the damn thing altogether?

Hell no. And this is why liberals work so hard to get out and rock the vote -- to encourage citizens to exercise their rights. That is our obligation as citizens, to protect against the government infringing upon our rights by making full use of them.

And yet, when it comes to the Second Amendment, liberals do not fight to protect that right. Instead them demand more laws. Regulate, regulate, regulate -- until the Second Amendment is nearly regulated out of existence because no one needs to have a gun anyway.

And that, sadly, is the biggest mistake of all.

No. 5: The Second Amendment is about revolution.

In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night.

It is the right of revolution.

Let me say that again: It is the right of revolution.

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government.

To alter or abolish the government. These are not mild words; they are powerful. They are revolutionary.

The Founders might never have imagined automatic weapons. But they probably also never imagined a total ban on handguns either.

We talk about the First Amendment as a unique and revolutionary concept -- that we have the right to criticize our government. Does it matter whether we do so while standing on a soapbox on the corner of the street or on a blog? No. Because the concept, not the methodology, is what matters.

And the Second Amendment is no different. It is not about how much ammunition is "excessive" or what types of guns are and are not permissible. Liberals cling to such minutia at the expense of understanding and appreciating the larger concept that underlies this right.

So.

What is the point? Is this a rallying cry for liberals to rush right out and purchase a gun? Absolutely not. Guns are dangerous when used by people who are not trained to use them, just as cars are dangerous when driven by people who have not been taught how to drive.

No, this is a rallying cry for the Bill of Rights -- for all of our rights.

This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "I just don't like guns."

This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "No one needs that much ammunition."

This is an appeal to every liberal who says, "That's not what the Founders meant."

This is an appeal to every liberal who supports the ACLU.

This is an appeal to every liberal who has complained about the Bush Administration's trading of our civil liberties for the illusion of greater security. (I believe I’ve seen a T-shirt or two about Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on that.)

This is an appeal to every liberal who believes in fighting against the abuses of government, against the infringement of our civil liberties, and for the greater expansion of our rights.

This is an appeal to every liberal who never wants to lose another election to Republicans because they have successfully persuaded the voters that Democrats will not protect their Second Amendment rights.

This is an appeal to liberals, not merely to tolerate the Second Amendment, but to embrace it. To love it and defend it and guard it as carefully as you do all the others.

Because we are liberals. And fighting for our rights -- for all of our rights, for all people -- is what we do.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment applies to states and cities as well as the federal government. Judging from their objections, the four dissenters were still reeling from the court’s landmark 2008 decision recognizing that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms.In their dissenting opinions, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer (joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor) worry that overturning gun control laws undermines democracy. If “the people” want to ban handguns, they say, “the people” should be allowed to implement that desire through their elected representatives.What if the people want to ban books that offend them, establish an official church or authorize police to conduct warrantless searches at will? Those options are also foreclosed by constitutional provisions that apply to the states by way of the 14th Amendment. The crucial difference between a pure democracy and a constitutional democracy like ours is that sometimes the majority does not decide.Likewise, Stevens defends “state and local legislatures’ right to experiment,” while Breyer is loath to interfere with “the ability of states to reflect local preferences and conditions — both key virtues of federalism.” Coming from justices who think Congress can disregard state decisions about the medical use of marijuana because a plant on the windowsill of a cancer patient qualifies as interstate commerce, this sudden concern about federalism is hard to take seriously.Another reason to doubt the dissenters’ sincerity: They would never accept federalism as a rationale for letting states “experiment” with freedom of speech, freedom of religion or due process protections. Much of their job, as they themselves see it, involves overriding “local preferences” that give short shrift to constitutional rights.Second Amendment rights are different, Breyer says, because “determining the constitutionality of a particular state gun law requires finding answers to complex empirically based questions.” So does weighing the claims in favor of banning child pornography or depictions of animal cruelty, relaxing the Miranda rule, admitting illegally obtained evidence or allowing warrantless pat-downs, dog sniffs or infrared surveillance.When they decide whether a law or practice violates a constitutional right, courts cannot avoid empirical questions. In cases involving racial discrimination or content-based speech restrictions, for example, they ask whether the challenged law is “narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest” and is the “least restrictive means” of doing so.But unlike equal protection or freedom of speech, Stevens says, “firearms have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty.” How so? “Just as they can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders,” he explains, “they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims.”Every right can be abused, with results that are immoral, illegal or both. Freedom of speech can be used to spread hateful ideas, promote pernicious political philosophies, slander the innocent or engage in criminal conspiracies. If there were no potential for harm from exercising a right, there would be no need to protect it, because no one would try to restrict it.The dissenters’ most frivolous objection is that making states obey the Second Amendment “invites an avalanche of litigation,” as Stevens puts it. Every day we hear about cases in which people argue that the government has violated their rights under the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth or Eighth amendment. Neither Stevens nor Breyer wants to stop this “avalanche.” Only when the Second Amendment is added to the mix do they recoil in horror at the prospect that Americans will use the courts to vindicate their rights.Stevens warns that “the practical significance of the proposition that ‘the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the states’ remains to be worked out by this court over many, many years.” But that’s because the court for many, many years ignored the Second Amendment while gradually defining the contours of its neighbors in the Bill of Rights. There is a lot of catching up to do.

Woof, Liberal lawyers, judges, professors, and other so called Constitutional experts have for many years been poisoning the well by putting various ideas and interpretations of the Second Amendment out in the public sphere that completely goes against what the amendment was intended to protect. Any course you take in college or book you pick up on the Bill of Rights, will firmly place these ideas in your mind; things like saying the Second Amendment was put in the Bill of Rights to make sure the government had soldiers at the ready and now it is outdated for that purpose. In other words this wasn't about protecting a citizens right to keep and bear arms at all but instead it was about protecting the United States from attack and it was put there as a benefit to the government and the states to have a armed militia. This poison pill that they have drilled into our heads and into every lawyer and Constitutional expert that comes out of our finest schools, has been what the enemies of freedom have hung their hat on in order to strip the Second Amendment of its power to protect citizens from tyranny. Of course the latest ruling from the Supreme Court of the United States, has worked as an antidote to lessen the effect of that poisonous idea. However, the poison is still there in every major work on the Bill of Rights and Constitutional law. So here I would like to counter these ideas with some simple facts that you might use to correct the record. Let's start with first things first. What was the intended purpose of the Bill of Rights to begin with? For that we can look at the preamble to the Bill of Rights. What? Never heard of that before? I wonder why? Well, here it is:

PREAMBLE

Congress of the United States begun and held at the City of New-York, on Wednesday the fourth of March, one thousand seven hundred and eighty nine

THE Conventions of a number of States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that futher declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent starts of its institution.

RESOLVED by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, two thirds of both Houses concurring, that the following Articles be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, all, or any of which Articles, when ratified by three fourths of the said Legislatures, to be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of the said Constitution; viz.

ARTICLES in addition to, and Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, proposed by Congress, and ratified by the Legislatures of the several States, pursuant to the fifth Article of the original Constitution.

The second paragraph states the reason and purpose for the Bill of Rights, including the Second Amendment by the way, very plainly..."in order to preventmisconstruction or abuse of its powers,that furtherdeclaratory and restrictive clausesshould be added:And as extending the ground ofpublic confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent starts of its institution." It makes it very clear that these amendments are intended to restrict the government and not to give it protections, but instead to ensure public confidence. Next, what the Second Amendment actually said before it was misconstructed and abused and rewritten by the poisonous pen of interpretation.

Second Amendment

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

The first part is what the interpreters deem to contain the important meaning and purpose of the amendment and the last half, according to them, is just meaningless drivel. Now, anyone who's thinking hasn't been impaired by the poisonous ideas planted in all the literature about the Second Amendment would immediately recognize the first part as being a supporting statement to what follows, and they would respect the placement of commas that separate the statement from the declaration and restriction clause. What did the Preamble say? "...in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that futher declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added." and what does the last half of the Second Amendment say? This is the declaratory part, note the comma: "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, And the restrictive part: shall not beinfringed." The first part that mentions the Militia as a supporting statement, is just one given reason among many as to why this declaration and restriction had its place in the Bill of Rights and it has no importance or bearing on its meaning at all, at least not if you believe the preamble. Which might explain why it is never mentioned in all those expert opinions. Am I really that much smarter than all all those Constitutional experts? These people are despicable for intentionally misleading the public and undermining our rights by way of academic terrorism. This is intellectual dishonesty at its worse. P.C. all rights reserved, copyright 2010 by Prentice Crawford

"A well regulated militia, composed of the gentlemen, freeholders, and other free men was necessary to protect our ancient laws and liberty from the standing army. And we do each of us, for ourselves respectively, promise and engage to keep a good fire lock in proper order and to furnish ourselves as soon as possible with and always keep by us, one pound of gunpowder, four pounds of lead, one dozen gun flints and a pair of bullet moulds, with a cartouch box or powderhorn and bag for balls." Fairfax County Militia Plan, written by George Mason, co author with James Madison of the Second Amendment

Post-McDonald Challenges to Gun Laws--from the Second Amendment Foundation and, Believe It or Not, the ACLU

Brian Doherty | July 16, 2010

New legal challenges to state and local laws restricting Second Amendment rights allowed by last month's decision in McDonald v. Chicago are rolling out.

From the same team of lawyer Alan Gura and institutional plaintiff Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) that fought and won McDonald comes Kachalsky v. Cacase. Details from the SAF press release:

The Second Amendment Foundation has filed a federal lawsuit against Westchester County, New York and its handgun permit licensing officers, seeking a permanent injunction against enforcement of a state law that allows carry licenses to be denied because applicants cannot show “good cause.”

SAF is joined in the lawsuit by Alan Kachalsky and Christina Nikolov, both Westchester County residents whose permit applications were denied. Kachalsky’s denial was because he could not “demonstrate a need for self protection distinguishable from that of the general public.” Nikolov’s was denied because she could not demonstrate that there was “any type of threat to her own safety anywhere.”...

Under New York Penal Code § 400.00, handgun carry permit applicants must “demonstrate good cause for the issuance of a permit,” the lawsuit alleges. This requirement violates the Second Amendment, according to the plaintiffs.

“American citizens like Alan Kachalsky and Christina Nikolov should not have to demonstrate good cause in order to exercise a constitutionally-protected civil right,” noted SAF Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb. “Our civil rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, should not be subject to the whims of a local government or its employees, just because they don’t think someone ‘needs’ a carry permit...."

The Kachalsky complaint.

And from a far more unexpected place, the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida is suing the Broward County sheriff's office pro bono to help a man get his guns back. Details from the Sun-Sentinel (Full disclosure: I was a paperboy for the Sun-Sentinel when I was 12 years old.):

That the ACLU, a long-time target of conservatives' scorn, is supporting gun ownership is "a breath of fresh air," said Marion P. Hammer, board member of the National Rifle Association....

Is this new alliance a sign of the apocalypse?

Not really, says Fort Lauderdale attorney Barry Butin, a cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Florida's Broward Chapter who is representing the gun owner, Pompano Beach retiree Robert Weinstein.

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have affirmed the right to maintain guns in the home.

"Under the Second Amendment, he has a right to have his guns in his house. He's not a convicted felon," Butin said. "It is unusual for the ACLU. But the ACLU supports all constitutional rights. We don't pick and choose."....

Weinstein, a retired bar and restaurant owner from Hartford, Conn., had his weapons seized in February after Dana, his wife of 61 years, died. He told the Broward Medical Examiner's Office that he wanted to "blow his head off," according to a sheriff deputy's report.

He said he was upset because three weeks after Mrs. Weinstein died, her ashes still hadn't shown up at the funeral home that was to bury them.

Weinstein's call to the medical examiner prompted a visit from a sheriff's deputy, who took the widower to a hospital for evaluation.

Weinstein said he agreed to surrender his Colt semi-automatic .25-caliber pistol and his Wesson .357 revolver, along with ammunition and holsters, for safekeeping after authorities insisted on it.

A hearing on his petition is scheduled before Circuit Judge Dale Ross on Monday.

Robert Weinstein insists authorities took his comment about killing himself out of context. And although Florida's Baker Act allows people with mental illnesses to be involuntarily admitted to a hospital, that did not happen to him.

Butin said he has a doctor's letter certifying that Weinstein is not a threat to himself. His client also has a clean Florida criminal record.

Weinstein, who said he learned to shoot in the military, said his guns were only kept for protection.

Of course, the ACLU does pick and choose where its attention and resources go and doesn't defend all constitutional rights with the same attention and vigor. Which makes it all the more interesting, and better, that now another ACLU affiliate now has its eyes on the Second Amendment. (The Texas ACLU also acted in defense of Second Amendment rights back in 2007, as Jacob Sullum blogged.) My Reason Online piece about the McDonald decision and its meaning.

Here’s a two-Americas story for you: Westchester County, in the suburbs of New York City, was home to Hillary Clinton when she pretended to represent New York in the U.S. Senate, and its voters gave Barack Obama 63 percent of their ballots in 2008. It’s the sort of place that causes heavy breathing among the liberal faithful de voutly awaiting the coming of the New Democratic Majority, that blessed condition that will enrapture America when formerly Republican white suburbanites once and for all join forces with the traditional Democratic coalition of ward heelers and welfare recipients in common cause against the pro-lifers, gun nuts, and tea-partying Palin enthusiasts of the GOP. So sayeth the Gospel according to Paul Begala.

But Westchester County has a prob lem more often seen in rural, Republican-leaning jurisdictions: coyotes. These ca nine predators are a real menace, a fact that was dramatically illustrated in late June by the case of young Emily Hod u lik, age six, who was attacked by a pair of coyotes on a leafy suburban street in the quaint town of Rye. The coyotes’ offensive proceeded along classically predatory lines as the canines ignored the other children in the group and targeted the smallest, weakest child. Miss Hodulik suffered serious bite wounds but escaped without life-threatening injuries. She’s undergoing a series of rabies shots, doesn’t like to sleep alone, and is afraid that there are coyotes in the basement of the family home. Local officials have warned Westchester residents to keep an eye out for the beasts, especially if they have small children.

Coyotes like to attack the little ones, human or otherwise. That was the case for one unfortunate coyote that attacked a puppy out for a jog with his master in Travis County, Texas, in the suburbs of Austin, where coyotes have it a little rougher than they do in suburban New York. That particular coyote had the bad luck to set his gaze on a puppy owned by Gov. Rick Perry, who produced a laser-sighted .380-caliber automatic pistol, loaded with hollowpoints, and sent it to the Happy Hunting Grounds.

Governor Perry made light of the epi sode — he later signed a peace treaty with the San Antonio Spurs’ coyote mascot — but the gunplay riled more than a few liberals. A Huffington Post story about it received more than 3,000 reader comments, many of them mocking in tone, most aghast that the governor was packing his own laser-sighted heat. Some of them bemoaned the suburban sprawl that is encroaching on the coyotes’ natural habitat, all but demanding a collective examination of conscience: Why do the coyotes hate us? Never mind that coyotes have turned up in Central Park, or that one recent deadly coyote attack — ending the life of a young Canadian folk singer — happened on a hiking trail in a national park. Evolution bred coyotes to be predators. They are what they are, and sometimes they have to be shot.

People have a visceral reaction to guns, which is why the reactions to the Supreme Court’s recent decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago have been so emotional. One extraordinarily telling reaction came from David Ignatius of the Washington Post, whose response was headlined: “The Supreme Court Gun Decision Moves Us Toward Anarchy.” Mr. Ignatius wrote: “My biggest worry with Monday’s Supreme Court decision is that by ruling, in effect, that every American can apply for a gun license, the justices will make gun ownership much more pervasive in a society that already has too many guns. After all, if I know that my neighbor is armed and preparing for Armageddon situations where law and order break down (as so many are — just read the right-wing blogs) then I have to think about protecting my family, too. That’s the state-of-nature, everyone for himself logic that prevails in places such as Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Mr. Ignatius here is remarkably forthcoming: He is not worried about guns in the hands of criminals, but about guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens, people who are willing to apply for a permit and jump through the bureaucratic hoops re quired of gun buyers. His nightmare is not an America in which criminals run amok with Glocks, or even an America in which gun permits are handed out liberally, but an America in which “every American can apply for a gun license.” Never mind the approval of licenses, the mere application gives Mr. Ignatius the howling fantods. It is wonderfully apt that he references the “state of nature” in his criticism, imagining a Hobbesian version of life in these United States: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, permeated by the aroma of cordite. Mr. Ignatius, like Thomas Hobbes, is casting his lot with Leviathan and makes no apology for it.

That is the essence of 21st-century progressivism: In matters ranging from financial derivatives to education to gun control, the Left believes that we face a choice between a masterful state and a Hobbesian war of all against all. For all of the smart set’s vaunted and self-congratulatory nu ance, it is this absolutist vision, this Manichean horror, that forms the foun dation of progressivism.

This, and not the threat of uncontrollable crime, is really at the heart of the subur ban progressives’ abomination of firearms. Coyotes may be an occasional menace, but the predators most commonly stalking Central Park, Westchester County, or the Austin suburbs go on two legs, not four. Just before the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in McDonald v. City of Chicago, there were in one weekend 50-odd shootings in the Windy City, at least ten of them fatal. Some of the shootings were instances of the random and chaotic violence that plagues urban America. Some were more sinister: Two young black men were found stripped naked and shot, face down in the dirt near the railroad tracks on the South Side. As of June, the murder rate in New York City — which likes to advertise itself as the safest big city in America — was up 7.2 percent over last year.

But the idea that individuals might use firearms lawfully to defend themselves is either anathema to progressives or inconceivable to them. President Obama’s reaction to the Heller decision, the predecessor to McDonald v. Chicago, suffered the in evitable lacunae: “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms, but I also identify with the need for crime-ravaged communities to save their children from the violence that plagues our streets through commonsense, effective safety measures,” he said, unable to consider the possibility that citizens’ arming themselves against criminals is one potentially effective safety measure. “As president, I will uphold the constitutional rights of law-abiding gun-owners, hunters, and sportsmen. I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne.” Coming from a city of gangland executions, Barack Obama affirms his commitment to Elmer Fudd’s blunderbuss, and reasonable people might wonder: What exactly does work in Chicago, Mr. President? That is an unaskable question in the world of Barack Obama, because it is a question that penetrates to the center of his philosophy and exposes it as inadequate.

Violence is traditionally something upon which the state maintains a monopoly, and the application of lethal force is the state’s most jealously guarded prerogative. It is treated as a kind of holy office, which is one of the reasons that American executions are such strangely ritualized ceremonies. Under more frankly statist re gimes, executions are much more plebeian affairs: China, for instance, has a mobile “death van,” a kind of lethal-injection chamber on wheels, which it uses to dispatch with maximum efficiency those sentenced under one of its 68 varieties of capital offense. The execution vans are manufactured by Jinguan Auto, which also builds fortified limousines for China’s burgeoning class of oligarchs, and there’s a certain symmetry to that.

To use lethal force in self-defense is the ultimate declaration of independence, a kind of momentary secession from the authority of the government whose laws and prisons and police officers have, in that moment, failed the citizen. To acknowledge the right to self-defense — and the concomitant right to be forearmed against aggressors — is to acknowledge that some things are outside the state and its authority, or at least that some moments are outside the state and its authority.

The horror that progressives feel for gun owners is in many ways like the horror they feel for homeschoolers, whom they recognize, correctly, as one of the few truly radical movements in America. Prof. Robin West of Georgetown University’s law school offers a typical reaction to the phenomenon: “The husbands and wives in these families feel themselves to be under a religious compulsion to have large families, a homebound and submissive wife and mother who is responsible for the schooling of the children, and only one breadwinner. These families are not living in romantic, rural, self-sufficient farmhouses; they are in trailer parks, 1,000-square-foot homes, houses owned by relatives, and some, on tarps in fields or parking lots. Their lack of job skills, passed from one generation to the next, depresses the community’s overall economic health and their state’s tax base.” God defend the holy tax base!

Homeschooling families in fact have higher average incomes than non-homeschool families, a fact that Professor West acknowledges and then magics away through the device of the “radically fundamentalist movement family,” the one she locates on tarps in parking lots. Like Mr. Ignatius, Professor West is forthright about the statist origins of her horror: “Parents in many states have full authority, free of all state oversight, to determine the content of their children’s education,” a situation almost as unendurable as life in a 1,000-square-foot house. Professor West writes longingly of the golden age when practically all education was conducted under the tutelage of the state and opting out of the system was forbidden — and “parents who did so were criminals.”

You will not be surprised to read her lamenting a “constitutional culture” dominated by “militias, gun collectors, and ideologues constructing, with little help from courts and no resistance from liberals, an individual Right to Bear Arms.” She connects this Second Amendment horror to other challenges to unlimited state supremacy — the anti-tax movement and citizen border patrols — and, like David Ignatius, she cites Hobbes, framing the debate as Leviathan vs. anarchy, leaving no room for well-ordered liberty under constitutionally limited government: If those rubes out on the tarps can fill the young skulls of their plenteous broods with any old rubbish, without the least privity or countenance of authority, then they’re bound to get funny ideas about guns and taxes and illegal immigrants. And they are bound to chafe at having their lives run by Georgetown law professors.

Just as state schooling is not about education, but about the state, gun control is not about guns: It’s about control. A citizen who can fend for himself when the predators come or the schools fail is less inclined to look to the state for sustenance and oversight in other areas of life. To progressives, that’s an invitation to anarchy. To the men who wrote the Second Amendment, it was a condition of citizenship in a free republic. It’s what free men did, and do.

— Kevin D. Williamson is deputy managing editor of National Review, in whose July 19, 2010, issue this article first appeared.

One month ago, the Supreme Court held in McDonald v. City of Chicago that states, not just the federal government, are prevented from violating Americans’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. The Supreme Court did not, however, define the full scope of the right, nor the standard of review by which challenged statutes will be judged.

In other words: It ain’t over yet. A number of pending lawsuits across the country will further shape how the Second Amendment will be applied.

The first lawsuit of note comes from Chicago. As soon as the Supreme Court struck down the city’s handgun ban in McDonald, Mayor Richard Daley worked with the city council to pass a very restrictive gun-control regime to take the ban’s place. The National Rifle Association promptly filed suit, challenging, among other things: a ban on having more than one “assembled and operable” firearm in the home at any time; a rule forbidding gun owners to carry their firearms in their own garages, porches, and places of business; and a policy outlawing gun shops and shooting ranges in the city in spite of the training and range time the city requires for obtaining a permit.

California, which has long been the darling of gun-control groups for its heavy firearm restrictions, is also facing a day in court. Gun-show promoters have been litigating their right to have a show on Alameda County grounds, an action barred by a county ordinance. A three-judge panel decided last April that the Second Amendment applied to California, anticipating the conclusion in McDonald, but found that the ban on gun shows on county property was still constitutional.

The Ninth Circuit voted to re-hear the case en banc (that is, all nine justices would review the decision of the three-judge panel), but in light of McDonald, that order has been rescinded and the case remanded to the original panel for reconsideration. Rescinding an en banc re-hearing is an unusual turn of events, but nothing follows the norm in this suit. The panel has asked for further briefing from the parties, indicating that it may reverse itself on the constitutionality of the gun-show ban.

Also, the Supreme Court has vacated a decision of the Second Circuit upholding New York’s ban on nunchuks and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of its holding in McDonald. Though the McDonald case focused on firearms, the text of the Second Amendment encompasses “arms” in general, and the Second Circuit will provide some guidance on the constitutional protection of martial-arts weapons.

Just up the Hudson River, Alan Gura, the attorney who carried the day in the Heller and McDonald decisions, filed suit to challenge the discretionary permitting system for handgun carry in Westchester County, N.Y. At issue is whether permit applicants can constitutionally be required to show a “unique, heightened need for self-defense apart from the general public” in order to carry a gun. The Second Amendment allows for no such restriction on the right to bear arms, and by the time a need for self-defense arises — think, for example, of a woman who’s being stalked — a potential victim needs to be able to carry a gun right now, not after pulling together paperwork and waiting for government approval.

The New York right-to-carry case joins a similar suit that Gura filed against the District of Columbia in the wake of the Heller decision. California guns activists have an existing lawsuit challenging the concealed-carry policies of Yolo and Sacramento counties that will now be reconsidered in light of the McDonald decision. At least one Wisconsin prosecutor has declared that he will no longer enforce the state’s ban on concealed carry because of the recent Supreme Court action.

Yet another Alan Gura lawsuit is a challenge to North Carolina’s emergency-powers statutes. In essence, whenever a state of emergency is declared at any level of government in the Tarheel State, firearms sales or transfers are outlawed, as is carrying a firearm off one’s own premises (even for those with concealed-handgun permits). That doesn’t sound unreasonable at first blush, but officials have declared at least a dozen emergencies since September 2004, usually encompassing the entire state. This is an on/off switch for an enumerated right. Why have rights at all if the government can turn them off at will?

The future of the scope of the Second Amendment is unclear, but McDonald has guaranteed that, at last, a liberty the Founders considered worthy of a constitutional amendment will be taken seriously in courts across the land.

— David Rittgers is an attorney and legal-policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

I won't defend every act from the BATFE, but keep in mind they do a lot of heavy lifting targeting some of the most violent, dangerous criminal organizations we have in the US, often at great risk in doing so. They also provide a huge amount of funding and expertise to state and local law enforcement working arson/explosives cases.

I see the BATF as an unneeded national police force. To begin with alcohol ,Tobacco and Firearms are all legal and are regulated locally by sates and communities( Montana no not enforcing federal gun laws or Mi and Ca smoking bans). Also why should the BATF be a middle man funneling off tax dollars just to return it to local and state law enforcement? Most major cities and states have bomb squads and swat teams and investigating arson is better suited to the fire dept ,they specialize in that stuff then turn it over to local authorities.

Now I am not taking away from the risk of the individuals perform doing thier jobs .I am just saying that the BATF is redundant federal agency whose job could be handled better locally via the states or local agencies saving the tax payer money and getting rid of a layer of regulations.

The BATFE enforces federal laws passed by congress concerning alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives. States may or may not choose to have their own laws, but I'd argue and I think most of the public would agree that the federal gov't has a role in enforcing those laws passed at the federal level.

Not long ago, I was in an arson investigation class where one of the instructors was a homicide detective from a big, well funded department. He worked on a double homicide that stemmed from an arson at a mega sized apartment complex (Three story, 135 units). The arson destroyed the complex, injured many people and as it turned out, killed two people that had no connection to the gangster thugs that were trying to burn other people to death (an ex girlfriend and her child).

The case was overwhelming to both fire/rescue and law enforcement. Resources were called in from surrounding agencies, state investigators and the BATFE. The BATFE flew in arson specialists from around the country to assist in processing the sprawling crime scene. When preparing for trial, the BATFE built an exact model of the first section of apartment buildings to the exact specifications of the original buildings, filled with the same electrical system, carpeting and burned it in a recreation of the arson. The film of the reconstruction and the nationally recognized arson experts testified for the prosecution in the case, resulting in the conviction of the two thugs.

Arson investigation is very complex, expensive and can happen anywhere, including jurisdictions with small, underfunded local/state level agencies. Being able to pick up a phone to call in BATFE help in those scenarios is vital to solving/prosecuting those major cases.

That is all well and good, but I still see the ATF as a redundant ,unneeded agency whose job could be handled locally and by the states just as well. These agencies might also have an increase in funding if they didn't have the ATF acting as a middle man.Plus what do you do with the FBI ,DEA, US Marshalls , Home Land security and the Sercret Service?These are all federal law enforcement agencies that could also be contacted not to mention other states or localities.I'm just saying that the ATF or maybe one of the others need to go away like the Dept of energy and the Dept of education.As far as regulations go , there is the second amendment that is all the federal regulations you need ,as far as firearms go, and for the rest let the states deal with it ,like they are already doing with sate liquor boards and tobacco laws. That is why I say the ATF is not needed but don't get me started on Home land security.

The offices of U.S. Marshal and Deputy Marshals were created more than 200 years ago by the first Congress in the Judiciary Act of 1789, the same legislation that established the federal judicial system. The Marshals were given extensive authority to support the federal courts within their judicial districts and to carry out all lawful orders issued by judges, Congress, or the President.

The Marshals and their Deputies served the subpoenas, summonses, writs, warrants, and other process issued by the courts, made all the arrests, and handled all the prisoners. They also disbursed the money.

The Marshals paid the fees and expenses of the court clerks, U.S. Attorneys, jurors, and witnesses. They rented the courtrooms and jail space and hired the bailiffs, criers, and janitors. They made sure the prisoners were present, the jurors were available, and the witnesses were on time.

But this was only a part of what the Marshals did. When George Washington set up his first administration and the first Congress began passing laws, both quickly discovered an inconvenient gap in the constitutional design of the government. It had no provision for a regional administrative structure stretching throughout the country. Both the Congress and the executive branch were housed at the national capitol. No agency was established or designated to represent the federal government's interests at the local level. The need for a regional organization quickly became apparent. Congress and the President solved part of the problem by creating specialized agencies, such as customs and revenue collectors, to levy the tariffs and taxes. Yet, there were numerous other jobs that needed to be done. The only officers available to do them were the Marshals and their Deputies.

Thus, the Marshals also provided local representation for the federal government within their districts. They took the national census every 10 years through 1870. They distributed Presidential proclamations, collected a variety of statistical information on commerce and manufacturing, supplied the names of government employees for the national register, and performed other routine tasks needed for the central government to function effectively. Over the past 200 years, Congress and the President also have called on the Marshals to carry out unusual or extraordinary missions, such as registering enemy aliens in time of war, capturing fugitive slaves, sealing the American border against armed expeditions from foreign countries, and swapping spies with the former Soviet Union.

GM I love the onion they are a scream. I was in tears reading that.Also like the info on the US Marshals( learn something new everyday thanks)..See they(US Marshals) were already doing the job that home land secruity is doing and the ATF plus some other jobs.Think of it like the SEC ,and the financial collapse, they didin't enforce the regs that were already in place( actually encouraged bad loans do in part to the FM's) the govt in order to solve the problem creates more govt. Namely the finance reform bill more regulations and yet another govt agency involving enforcement of regulations.the govt that governs best governs least..believe that is Jeffereson.I believe the answer is always less govt be it regulations or agencies.

Boyo

Ps sorry about the scatter shot ideas above trying to get out and teach.JKD

This is exactly the sort of subject in which POTH must be read with maximum care:=========One June morning last year, Jack Dailey drove from his home in North Carolina’s Piedmont country, through verdant, hilly farmland to a rifle range near the town of Ramseur. Eleven men and a woman had mustered there for a weeklong boot camp run by the Appleseed Project, a group Dailey started that is dedicated to teaching every American how to fire a bullet through a man-size target out to 500 yards. So far Appleseed has taught 25,000 people to shoot; 7,000 more will learn by the end of this year. Its instructors teach this skill not for the purpose of hunting or sport. They see marksmanship as fundamental to Americans’ ability to defend their liberty, whether against foreigners or the agents of a (hypothetical) tyrannical government. Appleseed frames this activity as being somewhere between a historical re-enactment and a viable last resort. I came to find out how serious they were.

Dailey, Appleseed’s founder and rhetorician in chief, is a tall man with silver hair. He wore black sneakers, a red polo shirt tucked into jeans and a red baseball cap. Sixty-six years old, he could have been a grandfather spending a leisurely morning on a public golf course if not for his unyielding expression and his voice, which is well equipped for the stirring up of men.

In the previous day’s lecture, Dailey discussed taxes — the situation of the American taxpayer, he said, compared unfavorably with the lives of slaves in ancient Egypt. Today he got down to the matter at hand: defense against overweening government. “Look at the choice those guys made,” he said, referring to the colonial-era militia. “I’ll post you 65 yards from the road. In a few hours there’s gonna be hundreds of redcoats marching down that road. Your liberty depends on you stopping ’em.”

Two lead musket balls were passed around the clubhouse, through the hands of a camouflaged Navy midshipman, two sheriff’s deputies, a farm-owning factory worker, a college professor, a pilot, a retiree and a high-school sophomore. Those who shot an “expert” score on Dailey’s qualification test would become “riflemen,” as designated by olive-green patches. For now, most of these novice shooters were referred to as “cooks.”

“When you fire that first shot, those redcoats are gonna be mad,” Dailey said. “They’re gonna come at you with those 16-inch bayonets. There’ll be three or four of ’em before you load your second shot.” He paused. Thoughts of bayonets seemed to linger in the silent room. “Not much percentage in that choice. We know now that they won. But for them? No guarantees.”

The Appleseed Project began with commentaries Dailey writes, under the byline of “Fred,” that run beside advertisements for his surplus-rifle-stock business in the magazine Shotgun News. In 2005, he organized his first Appleseed shoots in Wyoming and Texas. The combination of military-style rifle training, star-spangled rhetoric and low cost ($70 for two days; free for women, minors and military personnel) proved catching. Word of the program spread through gun culture and survivalist Web sites. The tax filings of the Revolutionary War Veterans Association, the nonprofit group that oversees Appleseed, show that the group now has $334,000 in cash. The Appleseed Web site lists as many as 100 shoots a month on the outskirts of towns like Eureka, Kan., Pine Bluffs, Wyo., and Coeur D’Alene, Idaho.

At the North Carolina shoot, the cooks came from Georgia, Florida, Illinois and Ohio, bearing .22-caliber Rugers and Marlins outfitted with custom sights — what Appleseed calls Liberty Training Rifles. Though they were diverse in age and class, their uniformly white skin, down-home talk and traditional values suggested a common attachment to an America that had lost its long-held claim to the cultural center. While Dailey has said Appleseed should be apolitical, the talk at this Appleseed boot camp and at several others I attended across the country over the course of a year contained pieces of a conversation that has unfolded behind the motley carnivals of the Tea Party movement: a serious deliberation on the right about the nature of the American founding and the limits of incivility. Sharron Angle, the Republican nominee for Senate in Nevada who is campaigning against Harry Reid, has spoken of the possibility of “Second Amendment remedies” for Congressional action. “The nation is arming,” she told The Reno Gazette-Journal in May. “What are they arming for if it isn’t that they are so distrustful of their government? They’re afraid they’ll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That’s why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don’t win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?” Rick Barber, a Republican candidate for Congress in Alabama, has broadcast an ad in which an actor dressed as George Washington declares, “Gather your armies.”

============

Firing Line

Published: July 29, 2010

(Page 2 of 6)

Are statements like these rhetorical flourishes or calls to arms? Determining whether this revolutionary talk constitutes a threat comes down to finding the fine line between expressing anger and inciting the angry to action, a distinction that is clear as a matter of law but less so in cultural practice. In April, on the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, former President Bill Clinton sought to move this cultural line, comparing today’s antigovernment sentiment with that of the mid-’90s. Clinton argued that those who demonize the federal government could be courting another tragedy. There is, however, a rejoinder to this from the right. “The sense in the year 2010 that there’s something threatening about civilian marksmanship is a function of 1990s political correctness and guilt by association,” Nick Dranias, director of the Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute, said. “These groups are trying to take guns out of the shadows and display them proudly, in public, not as a bunch of weirdos crawling around the forest at night.”

nside the Appleseed Project, the question of where an armed citizenry should draw this line remains open. Later that week, as he sipped a Coke at a nearby McDonald’s, Dailey flirted with an answer. “If you ever have to reach for your guns, you’ve lost before you started,” he said, and then doubled back. “Now, there are probably some narrow, hypothetical exceptions to that. Like if somebody in the government said, ‘We’re taking over the country.’ You might find there’d be a spontaneous. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know what it would be. And to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn’t want to see it.” The ﬁrst night’s campfire sounded less like sedition and more like men telling stories of times they looked death in the eye. Ron Vandiver, the boot camp’s head instructor, made death’s acquaintance while trying to repair a swaying radio tower on a stormy afternoon. Vandiver is the kind of man that Dailey likes to characterize as a “regular American,” words intended as the highest praise. A stout 42-year-old with a gadget-laden belt, he looked like a dad I might see at Home Depot. His eyes watered up when he spoke of an ancestor who fought in the Continental Army. He asked how far back each of us could feel our national history as opposed to just reading about it. “The war between the states,” one man said. “World War II,” another said. “That’s a shame,” Vandiver said. “We’re here to extend your historical horizon of empathy.”

The main zones for projecting the past onto the present were the “redcoats,” paper targets stapled to wooden poles at 25 meters. Four red silhouettes represented kills at 100, 200, 300 and 400 yards. On the third day the cooks moved to the 500-yard range, where they fired AR-15’s, M1As, and M1 Garands. In the middle of the firing line lay David and Darrell Garvey, two brothers with sun-reddened skin and graying beards. Before the housing crash, the Garveys grossed as much as $1 million a year installing floors in vacation homes. Now they were unemployed. They loaded their magazines and pulled the charging handles. “Ready on the right!” Vandiver bellowed. “Ready on the left! All ready on the firing line. . . . Fire!”

Darrell Garvey pressed his eye to the scope, trying to keep a red dot fixed on the blurry figure in the distance. He stilled his breathing and slowly squeezed the trigger. “Cease fire!” Vandiver shouted. “Unload and clear!” Darrell disarmed his rifle. He walked up the slope to his target and huffed in exasperation. A few shots hadn’t even hit the paper.

Darrell turned to Vandiver. “If, God forbid, the worst happens and this all becomes reality, would you recommend shooting out at 500 or waiting ’til they came closer in?”

“I’m too old and fat to run fast,” Vandiver answered. “So I like to give myself as big a head start as possible. On a two-way shooting range, I’m inclined to hit them out at 500.”

“Fred’s Plan to Save America,” an early photocopied manifesto, sets forth a doctrine of deterrence. Shooting is “training for the Day,” Dailey wrote. “The Day that will never come, if enough of us are ready for it.” Appleseed occasionally attracts those who believe this Day is already here. Dailey calls such fringe beliefs “the dark side.” One man at an Appleseed boot camp in Nevada announced his plan to assassinate county officials and ignite a guerrilla war. “It kinda floored me when he blurted that out,” Dailey recalls. “We fight this militia stuff all the time. If there’s the slightest truth to what he said, he was a dead man. Which means there’s probably no truth at all.” In Ramseur, Dailey’s rousing talk was followed by an introduction to the “soft war” fought with “ballots, not bullets.” Dailey did not say how the ballots should be cast, but I did meet many senior Apple­seed instructors with affinities for The Limbaugh Letter and Tea Party rallies (all of whom nonetheless obeyed the prohibition on partisan discussions during the program itself).

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Last fall, a report by the Anti-Defamation League called Appleseed part of a trend in which romanticized notions of armed resistance have “percolated beyond extremist groups and movements into the mainstream.” It stopped short of saying Appleseed was itself an extremist group, though Mark Pitcavage, the A.D.L.’s director of investigative research, characterized Appleseed as a potential gateway to militias. “I’m concerned not in the sense that I think the Appleseed Project is dangerous,” he told me. “But it does have a goal of indoctrination.”

MultimediaBut the sociologist James William Gibson, whose book “Warrior Dreams” analyzed civilian paramilitary culture since the mid-’70s, says Appleseed and the broader movement around it are unlikely to pose a danger to civil society. “When a culture is in crisis, the first response is often to go back to the creation myth and start over again,” he told me. “The narrative is ‘we’re going to redo the narrative of the United States by returning to origins, to marksmanship.’ People are focusing on the idea that America’s problems can be resolved into something that can be shot. It doesn’t exactly encourage systematic reflection, but it’s a long ways from a civil war.” The National Rifle Association declined to address the question of where Appleseed fits into the gun culture. “We are familiar with who they are and what they do,” a spokesman, Andrew Arulanandam, told me. “But given that we don’t have firsthand experience, we are reticent to say anything beyond that.” Maynard Reid Jr., the sheriff of Randolph County in North Carolina, which includes the Ramseur range, told me he hadn’t heard of the Appleseed Project, though he sometimes rents the range from Dailey for sniper training. “Jack Dailey is a straightforward guy,” he told me. “He don’t try to sugarcoat things. He’s a good man, as far as I know.”

Appleseed’s claim to mainstream legitimacy is bolstered by the group’s ties to active-duty members of the military. In March, an instructor who works as a researcher at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico arranged for Appleseed to conduct five days of training with a brigade from the Second Engineer Battalion. Appleseed also gave free on-base training to a unit from the South Carolina National Guard. I shot at Appleseed boot camps alongside Marines looking to hone their skills before deployment. They came to Appleseed out of uniform, on their own accord. The final two days of the Ramseur boot camp were led by 26-year-old John Hawes, who won a Silver Star in Afghanistan and recently taught marksmanship to soldiers at Fort Jackson. “The Army’s gotten away from the basics,” he told me.

On one of the final afternoons of boot camp, Gordon Wade, a math professor at Bowling Green State University, was cooking outside his tent. Dailey lumbered up and told Wade he had the makings of a good instructor. Wade said he wasn’t sure how many of his academic peers he could bring into the Appleseed fold. “They might think it’s some kind of militia,” he said.

The men stood in silence. Wade stirred his dinner. “A man should have a rifle,” he said. “Not just a .22. A man should have an AR-15 the same way he should have one good suit. Now, I can’t really think of a scenario where I’m going to use my AR-15 as an AR-15. I can’t quite articulate it. It sounds like I want to go out fighting zombies” — slang for the unprepared — “or feds. I don’t want to. But if it ever comes to that, God forbid, I want to be able to. But no, no. . . .” He shook his head. “That isn’t it either. It’s just something that I think I should have. Fred, why should I have an AR-15?”

Dailey stood with his arms crossed. He said: “Because they want to tell us what to do. And we don’t want them to tell us what to do.”

Dailey keeps his rifle stocks in an old Coca-Cola warehouse filled to the rafters with the remainders of war — empty bandoleers, rifle slings, rifle butt plates, rifle brushes, rifle grease. Thousands of wooden stocks stripped of their actions lay in jumbled piles. Dailey fired his first gun at age 6, a .22 aimed at a tree stump. He pulled the trigger; his father held the stock. His first rifle was a Japanese Model 99, a present from his mother for his 19th birthday. The physical fact of the gun led him to consider what action it might have seen. “The joy of owning these things is tough to explain,” he says. “Either you feel it or you don’t.” In the Army R.O.T.C. at North Carolina State University, he learned to fire and strip an M1 Garand. Academic deferments kept him out of Vietnam. In 1969, he took a bus to Washington to march against the war. “I thought this was a serious thing,” he says. “Everyone else was there to party.” He gave up his activist stirrings for law school, married, graduated and began rehabbing apartment buildings in Chicago. He did well enough to retire at 42, but the experience eroded his idealism. “A landlord is like a cop or a bartender,” he says. “You get to see people as they really are.” His politics moved toward “the iron rule of life: everyone wants to be first in line to eat and last in line to die.” The economic malaise of the late 1970s seemed to confirm this pessimism. He sought comfort in survivalist magazines and stockpiled rifles and canned food. In the mid-1980s, he sold off his properties and moved with his wife back to North Carolina.

Dailey’s frustration with the government peaked during the 1990s after the fatal conflicts at Ruby Ridge and Waco. “Uncle Sam told 76 Americans to come out of their own house, lay down their arms and spread-eagle on the ground,” he says of Waco. “Does that sound to you like the sovereignty of the individual?” At that time, growing restive, he bought more than half a million pounds of rifle stocks at an army-surplus auction. He named his new venture “Fred’s,” after his dog, and wrote indictments of the Clintons and the “New World Order” that reached 94,000 readers. As the radical right gathered steam in the ’90s, Dailey’s anger fixated on the United Nations, which he saw as a metagovernment bent on covertly undermining American sovereignty. He organized a “U.N. Day” shoot at a local gun club, painting targets United Nations blue and firing holes through a steel U.N. helmet. In 2002, Dailey wrote “Battlin’ the U.N.,” a near-future story of six riflemen who ambush a U.N. convoy rolling through Iowa. Using the accompanying targets, Dailey’s readers could practice shooting Boris, the villainous U.N. commander.

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Dailey calls all this “my young and stupid years.” The Appleseed Project appeals to a broad constituency, one whose edges blur into the N.R.A. at one end and into violent militias like the Hutaree, nine of whose members were indicted in March for conspiracy to murder, at the other end. Notices of Appleseed shoots appear regularly on militia Web sites. Dailey argues that outreach like this attracts radical anger and then moderates it. Many Appleseeders have stories like that of Rod Jackson, a former bouncer whom I met at a shoot in Fresno, Calif. After leaving the Navy, Jackson spent years as a homeless alcoholic but now works by day as a telecommunications technician and by night at a gun range. He has long been preparing for an event he read about online — Teotwawki, which stands for “the end of the world as we know it.” He stored up enough food to feed his family for 30 days and planned to relocate to a remote valley. “I was going to hide myself in a hole,” he said. “Then Fred made this comment that people who build caves are cowards. That stung.”

As his involvement with Appleseed deepened, Jackson found his focus shifting to what he could accomplish within the present system. “A lot of folks in the gun community talk about stepping up and fighting,” he said. “That’s skipping over the easy stuff for the hard stuff. The point is that we don’t need to fight now. We have another option.” That option, he said, was contacting elected representatives.

In a cramped room adjoining the warehouse, Dailey monitors the message board and plows through queries from instructors. In a recent post he acknowledged that though he once “flirted with the dark side,” there was no place for the rhetoric of deterrence within Appleseed. Statements like “we’ll soon be in a future when the shooting starts,” he wrote, are not compatible with Appleseed’s mission.

During my travels through Appleseed country, I spoke with nearly 100 cooks and riflemen and corresponded with dozens more. None seemed as close to the dark side as James Faire of Monroe, Wash., a man obsessed with reducing the space between readiness and action to the thinnest possible line. After years of practice Faire has whittled that space down to the fraction of a second that it takes him to open the snap holster on his belt, draw and level the Kimber 1911 he carries whenever outside the house, apply pressure to the hair trigger and fire a hollow-point .460-caliber round into his target, all while backpedaling at a 45-degree angle. “This is called moving off the X,” he told me. “By the time you draw on them and say, ‘Drop the weapon,’ you’re already dead.”

Faire has practiced this maneuver thousands of times. He says he came close to using it last year while trying to clear a downed tree from the road leading to his five-acre homestead in Monroe. A sheriff’s deputy drove up, lights flashing, with his own ideas about how best to clear the tree. Words were exchanged. The hands of both men drifted down toward their holsters. The way Faire tells it, the peace of Snohomish County momentarily teetered. Then the deputy got back in his car and drove away.

Deputies, Faire says, are criminals operating “under the color of law.” He refuses to vote, and the signature on his driver’s license appears with the disclaimer “all rights reserved.” Some of Faire’s views resemble those of the sovereign-citizen movement, extremists who deny the legitimacy of federal law. Faire heard about Appleseed through a Web site he administers called A Well Regulated Militia. Last year he began hosting monthly Appleseed shoots on his land, which appeared on Appleseed’s print and online schedules. In 2008, a government informant reportedly observed Andrew Steven Gray shooting an AR-15-style rifle and a pistol on Faire’s range. Gray, a 33-year-old convicted felon, is legally barred from owning any firearms. In Gray’s storage locker, according to a government complaint, federal agents found a cache of 21 guns, four silencers, two bulletproof vests and 9,000 rounds of ammunition. At his home nearby, says the complaint, were several hundred marijuana plants. Last month Gray was sentenced to four years in prison on gun and drug charges.

The complaint against Gray states that Faire’s range is known as the Militia Training Center, which “routinely holds training for individuals involved with the militia movement.” When I brought all this up to Dailey, he said Faire was “wrapping himself in the flag of Appleseed” to manage his troubles with the county, which closed his range for code violations. I asked Faire whether Dailey had given him any flack. “Privately, they’ve been very supportive,” he said. Though Faire says he obeyed Appleseed’s prohibition against talking politics during his shoots, he can still be seen explaining Appleseed’s basics on YouTube and accusing President Obama of “telling people to shut up and not talk.”

Shortly after the arrests in March of nine people thought to be members of the Hutaree militia, I e-mailed Faire and asked whether he had any contact with the group. He replied that he trained with one of the accused Hutaree in 2005, “although he showed mental instability and further association was discouraged.” Faire says the charges were “made up of whole cloth. They had the motive and means and opportunity to resist their arrest but did not. If they were guilty, they would have resisted.”

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On an overcast winter day in Monroe, Faire and I sat beside a wood stove in a classroom a few steps away from his house. Targets of kaffiyeh-clad figures armed with rocket-propelled grenades leaned against the wall. I sipped coffee as Faire split wood and unfurled his politics. “The government has quite literally become tyrannical,” he said. “It is fulfilling the principles outlined in ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ ” His seemed to have a deep urge to see himself as a revolutionary, and it was hard to imagine him at a loss for a framework that would let him do so.

Multimedia“It’s completely out of control,” he continued, “from city to state to federal to international law. All predicate their existence on plundering the individual and his rights. The only thing to do now is to organize citizens into a militia to abolish this government. They’re the supreme law of the land, the only ones who have the moral and legal authority to do it.” His voice was calm. It was as if he knew these things were true to both of us. Faire, who is 50, has a neat mustache and moves with a martial steadiness. He often grips his belt with his right hand during conversation. It holds the holster of his 1911, the muzzle of which peeks out from beneath the waist of his black tactical jacket. The police, he said, often mistake him for an off-duty officer. He gave me a tour of his land, pointing out a ruined minivan used for sniper practice. Somewhere in the surrounding hills he once buried waterproof tubes containing clothes, provisions and six M1 Garands; he later dug them up and sold them to pay for his legal battle with the county over the code violations.

After lunch in the nearby city of Gold Bar, we returned to Monroe for a meeting at a diner with two friends that Faire met while working on the Ron Paul presidential campaign. One talked of establishing a camp where like-minded dissidents might be trained in the use of arms. The man asked for Faire’s help. Faire seemed reluctant to commit. The man said, “I told my wife 30 years ago, ‘I’m tired of being an insignificant man living in a broken culture.’ ” And yet here he was three decades later, still looking for his first recruit. Did he really want to be dangerous?

When American men talk like this, they are usually giving voice to fantasy. Only in fantasy, after all, are governments overthrown by men trained to do nothing more than shoot long-distance targets in a controlled environment. Some of these men seek out unlikely battlefields, where they can be warriors of the future, warriors of the imagination or reluctant warriors in waiting who are passing their time on the Internet. The power of a gun to take a life is not so much a threat as a talisman connecting these fantasies to the real world.

“When I hold a rifle in my hands, I can feel the choice that I’m making,” one Appleseeder, a computer programmer from Southern California, told me. “I know what I can do with this gun, but I also know I’m not going to do that. I have become death. When you have that power and that choice, you know what choice you’re going to make. When someone can be death over a quarter mile, that’s a tremendous responsibility.”

The exceptions to the rule of the responsible gun owner generate headlines and casualties. The largest threat that Appleseed poses is the possibility that some future gunmen will find their way from some dark-side message board to an Appleseed boot camp. “There’s always going to be someone who thinks the revolution is sooner rather than later,” Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center says. “Now they’re learning to be snipers. You would hope Appleseed would do some screening.”

When I asked Dailey about this, he said, “If we recruited 500 people from one of these crazy boards and 499 of them wound up agreeing with us, then what would you say?”

“I would want to know about the one who didn’t agree,” I said. “You’ve taught him how to kill with a rifle out to 500 yards.”

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“Well, the only precaution for that is not to teach the skills at all. Why even let them have the hardware, in that case?” He proposed an analogy. “What if the inmates in the asylum were stabbing each other with knives? Do you give them plastic spoons? Or do you cure the insanity?”

“But part of what you’re doing is sharpening the knives.”

“If we can cure the insanity, I think it’s a fair trade.”

On my last day in North Carolina, Dailey and I visited a Revolutionary War battlefield an hour’s drive from the warehouse. We walked through the wooded site as joggers and couples passed us on the trail. We came to a stop at two cannon replicas beside what had once been colonial lines. Dailey paraphrased what he called “the gay quote,” John Adams’s sentiment that he would study war, so his sons could study business and agriculture, so their sons could study the arts. “What a bad plan!” Dailey said. “The bad people of the world are still going to be there in three generations. So your grandson better know something about war. You can’t just have the third generation sitting around, ballet dancing, playing pianos and talking dilettante talk.”

I asked whether Appleseed was really about the decline of the American man. Dailey vehemently disagreed. To prove me wrong he stopped two young women, introduced himself and began to pitch the program. Wearing sandals and modish sunglasses, they appeared to be the sort of prospective Appleseeders who could buttress the program against the dark side.

“Pop quiz,” Dailey said. “When was the American Revolution won?”

“Yorktown is considered the final victory,” one of the women, Melissa Hogg, said. She majored in history at the University of Virginia, she said, specializing in the Revolutionary War.

“Would you believe what a founder said?” Dailey asked. “It was won before the first shot was fired, in the hearts and minds of the American people.”

“Of course,” Hogg said. “It’s a matter of ideology.”

Dailey seemed to bristle at this, hearing in Hogg’s words a disbelief in the specialness of American hearts and minds — and the suggestion that the motives behind the American Revolution were no better or worse than those of any other. Nevertheless, he gave the women Appleseed’s Web address.

As we made our way back to the parking lot, he shook his head. “You see what we’re up against?” he asked. “Imagine 300 million of those.”

a call to arms Online video of an Appleseed Project target practice in Iowa at nytimes.com/magazine.

There has been federal level law enforcement since the dawn of this nation, and from personal experience, I can tell you that we are better off having different agencies that fill specific roles. The BATFE has it's place, the FBI, it's, the Border Patrol, US Secret Service and others that work at the federal level do things that local/state agencies cannot. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. I support some BATFE reforms, but dissolving it won't end federal gun laws and another agency would just get tasked with enforcing those laws anyway.

According to The Korea Times, the Obama administration has blocked efforts by the South Korean government to sell over a hundred thousand surplus M1 Garand and Carbine rifles into the United States market. These self-loading were rifles introduced in 1926 and 1941. As rifles, they are especially well-suited to community defense in an emergency, as in the cases of community defense following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Along with AR-15 type rifles, the M1 rifles are the quintessential firearms of responsible citizenship, precisely the type of firearms which civic responsibility organizations such as the Appleseed Project teach people how to use.

According to a South Korean official, “The U.S. insisted that imports of the aging rifles could cause problems such as firearm accidents. It was also worried the weapons could be smuggled to terrorists, gangs or other people with bad intentions.”

Regarding the second objection, any firearm lawfully imported into the United States would eventually be sold by a Federal Firearm Licensee who, pursuant to the background check system imposed by Congress (and endorsed by the NRA) would have to contact federal or state law enforcement to verify that the gun buyer is not prohibited from possessing firearms. Accordingly, the risk that the South Korean surplus guns might fall into the hands of gangsters or other bad people is exactly the same as with the sale of any other retail firearm in the United States. Notably, neither the M1 Garand nor the M1 carbine are concealable, and the M1 Garand is long, heavy, and bulky. Accordingly, the criminal utility of such guns is relatively low.

The second Obama administration objection is accidents. But in fact, increasing gun density in the United States has been associated with steeply declining rates of gun accidents. In 1948 there were .36 guns per person. (That is, about one gun for every three Americans.) By 2004, there was nearly one gun for every American. In 1948, there were 1.6 fatal gun accidents per 100,000 persons. By 2004, the rate had fallen by 86%, so that there were .22 fatal accidents per 100,000 persons. (For underlying data, see Appendix B of my amicus brief in Heller.)

Legally, it is indisputable that the guns are importable. Being over 50 years old, the rifles are automatically “Curios and Relics” according to federal law. 27 CFR section 478.11. Accordingly, they are by statutory definition importable. 18 USC section 925 (e)(1). Notwithstanding the law, the Obama administration has the ability to pressure the South Korean government to block the sale of the guns.

President Obama was elected on the promise that he supported individual Second Amendment rights. His administration’s thwarting of the import of these American-made rifles is not consistent with that promise.

The 21st-Century Militia: State Defense Forces and Homeland SecurityPublished on October 8, 2010 by James Carafano, Ph.D. and Jessica Zuckerman BACKGROUNDER #2474

Abstract: State militias have helped to defend the United States since the Revolutionary War. Today, 23 states and territories have organized militias, most commonly known as State Defense Forces (SDFs). SDFs provide governors with a cost-effective, vital force multiplier and resource, especially if state National Guard units are deployed out of state. However, in general, SDFs are underfunded and undersupported. Some states at high risk for a natural or man-made disaster have not even created SDFs. The U.S. and its states can no longer afford to sideline these national security assets.

Since the founding of the United States of America, local militias have played an important role in its defense and security. Bolstered by the Founding Father’s concerns about maintaining a large standing army and preserved within the Constitution, the concept of the citizen soldier has since become ingrained in American culture and government.Currently, 23 states and territories have modern militias. As of 2005, these militias had a force strength of approximately 14,000 individuals nationwide.[1] Most commonly known as State Defense Forces (SDFs) or state militias, these forces are distinct from the Reserves and the National Guard in that they serve no federal function. In times of both war and peace, SDFs remain solely under the control of their governors, allowing the governors to deploy them easily and readily in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.

Building on a strong U.S. militia tradition, today’s State Defense Forces offer a vital force multiplier and homeland security resource for governors throughout the nation. SDFs can greatly fortify homeland security efforts in the states by serving as emergency response and recovery forces. Consequently, state leaders should make strengthening existing SDFs a priority, while encouraging their creation in states that do not yet have SDFs, especially in states at high risk of a natural or man-made disaster.

This paper is the result of a first attempt by any organization to conduct a comprehensive survey of the nation’s SDFs. The Heritage Foundation sent surveys to the leaders of all 23 of the nation’s SDFs, and 13 responded. This paper analyzes their responses, looks at the history of the SDFs and the issues and challenges that they face, and makes recommendations on expanding the SDF role in homeland security.

From the Founding Through TodayInformed by British history and colonialism, many of the Founding Fathers believed that a large standing army could easily become an instrument of tyranny.[2] Nevertheless, the onset of the Revolutionary War clearly demonstrated the undeniable need to field a unified, professional national defense force to defeat the British. Thus, in 1775, despite the colonies’ long reliance on militias to defend their territories, the Continental Congress created the Continental Army, the nation’s first standing military force.[3]

However, creation of the Continental Army did little to impede the continued existence of militias throughout the nation. While militias were decidedly less effective during the Revolutionary War than the Continental Army, they nevertheless contributed to the war effort. In the early battles and later as auxiliary support to the Continental Army, the militia helped to win the war, securing their continued role in the nation.[4]

Ultimately, despite misgivings about the effectiveness of militias, the Founding Fathers incorporated their belief that a well-regulated militia was “the ultimate guardian of liberty” into the Constitution.[5] Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution states:

The Congress shall have the power…to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.[6]

The language of the Constitution granted the federal government the power to call forth the militia of the United States, but left the states the ability to appoint officers and to train their militias.

Five years after the Constitution was ratified, state militia powers were more firmly defined by the Militia Act of 1792, which required all free men ages 18 to 45 to serve in the enrolled militia. Further, laying the basis for principles that guide today’s State Defense Forces, the act dictated that the Adjutant General (TAG) of each state would command the militia and that state militias would receive no federal funds. At the same time, however, the Calling Forth Act of 1792 gave the President power to mobilize any and all state militia forces when the nation was under threat of invasion or in times of “insurrections in any State.”[7]

However, the Militia Act and Calling Forth Act did not end the contest between state governors and the federal government for control over militia forces. Within a few decades, this debate reached the Supreme Court. In 1827, the Court ruled in Martin v. Mott that the President had the exclusive right to determine if conditions warranted mobilization of militia forces. However, in 1820, the Court held in Houston v. Moore that states maintained concurrent authority with the President to mobilize the militia in the event of a natural disaster, civil unrest, insurrection, or invasion. This decision helped to set the basis for the modern state-apportioned militias.[8]

By the end of the War of 1812, the militias enrolled under the Militia Act of 1792 had largely declined as population growth made their size unwieldy and ineffective.[9] As states increasingly abolished mandatory militia service, volunteer militias became more prevalent. During the Civil War, the combined force of enrolled and volunteer militias proved more useful than in any previous war. Northern militias acted both independently and in conjunction with the U.S. Army to guard prisoners, man forts, and protect the coast, freeing up federal troops for duty elsewhere.[10]

Despite their utility during the Civil War, volunteer militia forces remained largely disparate and disorganized bodies until the 20th century. In 1903, the latest Militia Act (the Dick Act) transformed all state militia forces into units of the National Guard.[11] While this measure helped to professionalize and organize the U.S. militia, World War I created unforeseen challenges for state governors.

Within months of the U.S. entrance into World War I, the entire National Guard Force of more than 300,000 guardsmen was mobilized for active duty.[12] Deprived of their National Guard units and concerned about sabotage and espionage attempts on the mainland, governors began to call for the creation of home defense forces or organized state militias. The Home Defense Act of 1917 permitted the states to raise home defense forces in cases where the National Guard had been federalized.[13] By December 1917, eight months after the U.S. entered the war, 42 states had formed home guards or State Defense Forces with a total force strength of approximately 100,000 men.[14] After World War I, most SDF units were disbanded, but they were revived again during World War II,[15] growing to 150,000 members in 46 states and Puerto Rico.[16]

After World War II, militias again declined, and circumstances did not prompt creation of large State Defense Forces until late in the Cold War. In the 1950s, Congress again passed legislation supporting the formation of state militias.[17] However, the creation and expansion of SDFs throughout the United States remained slow until U.S.–Soviet relations worsened and détente collapsed in the late 1970s.[18]

At the same time that the Cold War was driving the expansion of State Defense Forces, the unpopularity of the Vietnam War led to a drive to end conscription. In 1969, President Richard Nixon established a commission to determine how best to abolish the draft. The Gates Commission concluded that the best alternative to conscription would be an all-volunteer force. However, creating and maintaining this all-volunteer force would rely heavily on the Total Force Concept, which called for complete integration of all Active and Reserve components. Further, the Total Force Concept’s heavy reliance on Reserve forces increased the likelihood that states would be left without their National Guard troops if they were deployed overseas.[19] This realization led many states to revive their SDFs in the 1980s. Ultimately, in 1983, Congress amended the National Defense Act to authorize all states to maintain permanent State Defense Forces.[20]

The Modern Militia: State Defense ForcesAt present, 23 states and territories have SDFs, and their estimated force strength totaled 14,000 members as of 2005.[21] Authorized under federal statute Title 32 of the U.S. Code, SDFs are entirely under state control—unlike the National Guard— both in peace and otherwise.[22] Hence, while the National Guard is a dual-apportioned force that can be called to federal service under Title 10 or remain a state force under Title 32, State Defense Forces serve solely as Title 32 forces.

This status gives SDFs two important advantages. First, SDFs are continually stationed within their respective states and can be called up quickly and easily in times of need. Such a capability is particularly important when catastrophic disasters overwhelm local first responders and federal forces can take up to 72 hours to respond.[23] Second, SDFs are exempt from the restrictions of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal military forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement activities within the United States.[24] While the Posse Comitatus Act has never proven a major obstacle to deploying federal forces for domestic emergency response, SDFs permit a state military response uninhibited by legal obstacles.[25]

Each SDF is under the control of its respective governor through the state’s military department.[26] The Adjutant General, the state’s senior military commander and a member of the governor’s cabinet, commands the SDF on behalf of the governor. As SDF commander, TAG is responsible for all training, equipment allocation, and decisions regarding the SDF’s strength, activity, and mission. The Adjutant General is also the commander of the state’s National Guard units and often directs state emergency response.[27] Through TAGs, SDFs can easily coordinate with other key components of the state emergency response.

Despite its recognition in federal statute, creation of a State Defense Force remains at the discretion of each state governor, and 28 states have chosen not to create such forces. Creation of SDFs has met resistance from TAGs and the National Guard Bureau due to concerns over turf, costs, and even arming SDF members.[28] However, such objections make little sense given that SDFs are entirely volunteer organizations and offer the states a vital, low-cost force multiplier. Members are not paid for training, only some states compensate them for active duty, and SDFs generally have little equipment.[29] For example, in 2002 alone, the Georgia State Guard reportedly saved the state of Georgia $1.5 million by providing 1,797 days of operational service to the state.[30] In all, the state-apportioned status, organizational structure, and low-cost burden of SDFs make them a vital and practical resource for the states.

State Defense Forces Post-9/11Only months before 9/11, the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart– Rudman Commission) suggested making homeland security the primary mission of the National Guard.[31] However, after September 11, 2001, National Guard deployments reached their highest level since the Korean War.[32] This was understandably troubling to many state leaders given that “[g]overnors have the greatest responsibility for managing consequences of attacks,” but “[t]hey have the fewest resources with which to do it…only the state police and the National Guard to provide for law and order.”[33] In recent years, the high levels of National Guard deployment largely removed this resource from numerous states. Even in the states where National Guard forces remain present, the Guard is maintaining only about 62 percent of its equipment on hand for the states because of overseas deployments.[34] This has left some governors with just state police units to help to maintain security and facilitate emergency response. In addition, an emergency, particularly a catastrophic disaster, could quickly overwhelm state police and other first responders. If National Guard forces are unavailable because they are deployed elsewhere, then the state could rely on its SDF, if it has one, to reinforce police and first responders. While largely underdeveloped and underresourced, SDFs can fill this gap in state homeland security capabilities, giving governors a valuable force multiplier.

In recent years, State Defense Forces have proven vital to homeland security and emergency response efforts. For example, after 9/11, the New York Guard, New York Naval Militia, and New Jersey Naval Militia were activated to assist in response measures, recovery efforts, and critical infrastructure security.[35] An estimated 2,274 SDF personnel participated in support of recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina. SDF personnel were activated in at least eight states, including Texas, Maryland, Virginia, and Tennessee. They assisted directly with recovery efforts or stayed in their states to fill the roles of the state National Guard units that were deployed to assist in the recovery.[36] SDFs have also offered critical infrastructure protection. In Operation Noble Eagle, the homeland defense and civil support operation after 9/11, the Alaskan SDF aided in the efforts to protect the Alaska oil pipeline.[37]

History suggests that State Defense Forces may be most valuable in assisting the states in emergency response. In the event of a natural or man-made disaster, the first tier of response is state and local first responders. However, Hurricane Katrina exposed a vital difference between a “normal” disaster and a catastrophic disaster.[38] A catastrophic disaster quickly stresses the resources and capabilities of state and local responders. In such cases, the Title 32 National Guard troops can serve as the second tier of response. Yet given the National Guard’s high operational tempo over the past decade, the state Guard units may be unavailable. Likewise, the third tier, federal support in the form of reserve troops or FEMA assistance, may take up to 72 hours to mobilize and arrive at the scene of the disaster.[39] In contrast, State Defense Forces are by their nature located nearby. They also know the area and the resources at hand, giving them the potential to be a key element of emergency response for the states.

Besides being readily available and continually stationed within states, SDFs can carry out state homeland security missions without any major reorganization, which would be required if Congress were to implement the Hart–Rudman Commission’s recommendation to task the National Guard with this role. Furthermore, by assuming greater homeland security responsibility, SDFs would allow the National Guard to focus more on their Title 10 mission in the global war on terrorism. Moreover, unlike the dual-apportioned National Guard, State Defense Forces could focus more completely on homeland security than the National Guard.

Challenges FacedState Defense Forces offer an important homeland security asset to many states, but several challenges have prevented these forces from reaching their full potential. Existing SDFs are often underfunded and undersupported, and some vulnerable states have not yet formed SDFs.

One of the greatest challenges to the creation and maintenance of State Defense Forces across the nation is ignorance among state and national security leaders. Many of these leaders are fundamentally unaware of the existence and capabilities of SDFs. This is largely a public relations nightmare for the SDFs because this general ignorance greatly impedes SDF leaders’ efforts to make their cause and merits known.

However, lack of awareness is not the SDFs’ only major public relations challenge. Often those who are aware of SDFs confuse them with private militia forces associated with radical organizations. State Defense Forces are the modern state militias. These forces are government-authorized, organized, professional militias, in sharp contrast to their radical “counterparts.”

SDFs are also limited by the restriction forbidding them from receiving in-kind support from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). While SDFs should remain funded solely by the states, in-kind support in the form of equipment and facilities would enhance SDF training and capabilities. However, because the DOD does not directly support SDFs, they cannot use federal resources, even surplus federal equipment and supplies. This is particularly challenging given that many SDFs work closely with their state National Guards. Nevertheless, SDFs are not permitted to use Guard facilities, trucks, or equipment, even when state National Guard troops are deployed elsewhere and SDFs are filling in during their absence.

The Current State of SDFsThe State Defense Forces offer the states a much needed force multiplier for homeland security operations and provide critical support as an auxiliary to the National Guard. While the potential roles of SDFs received heightened attention immediately after 9/11, that attention has faded in recent years.

To assess current SDF resources and capabilities, The Heritage Foundation sent a survey to the leaders of the 23 existing SDFs. Thirteen states—Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, and Virginia—responded, providing a sampling of SDFs from across the United States. While the data received are limited and cannot draw a national picture of State Defense Forces, much can still be learned from the information gathered.

Mission. First, 11 of the 13 respondents indicated that their State Defense Forces have a defined mission under state law, but the identified missions varied greatly from state to state. Some forces focused more on a National Guard auxiliary mission. Other SDFs emphasize homeland security and civil support. The SDFs of Alabama, Georgia, Maryland, New Mexico, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, and Virginia identified their mission as acting largely to support the state National Guard. Other states defined their mission as providing communication backup and support, serving as a direct resource of the governor, operating search and rescue efforts, assisting in disaster response, and/or supporting emergency operating agencies and law enforcement as key components.In emergency response, 10 of the 13 SDFs play a designated role in their state or local emergency operation centers. Several of the SDFs participate in planning disaster mitigation tactics, either at the direction of the state National Guard, the governor, and/or the Adjutant General, rather than following a predetermined plan for disaster mitigation. Others simply encourage greater training and education among their members. Virginia and Georgia have gone so far as to incorporate their SDFs into their state all-hazards or disaster mitigation plans.

Funding. Survey results also support the notion that State Defense Forces provide a cost-effective solution to the problem of maintaining sufficient homeland security manpower at the state level. Only four of the 13 responding SDFs indicated that they pay their members when on active duty. The rest rely solely on volunteer service. Nevertheless, while SDFs are considered a low-cost asset, they still require adequate state funding to ensure that they have the resources necessary to carry out their assigned missions. In this regard, only nine of the 13 SDFs indicated that they receive state-appropriated funds. Yet despite inadequate funding, 10 of the 13 respondents plan to expand their SDFs, clearly reflecting the importance of these forces.

Force Strength. In force strength and composition, 10 of the 13 SDFs had active force strengths above 100 personnel as of January 2010. Vermont, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Indiana, Georgia, and Alabama reported forces of more than 200 members each, and Texas indicated an active force strength of 1,750—the largest of the SDFs.Yet many high-risk states do not have SDFs. Judging from more than 50 years of actuarial data on natural disasters, certain states face a predictable, high risk of experiencing a natural disaster.[40] Further, an analysis of funding of cities through the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) program has identified the 37 “highest risk” jurisdictions as indicated by the federal government. Of these high-risk states, Arizona, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania lack SDFs.

Additionally, SDF personnel tend to be retired military personnel and other professionals. In all but one of the 13 SDFs, the average age of SDF personnel is 42 years or older. While some point to the higher age of SDF members as a disadvantage, in fact this is a great strength because it often reflects the members’ extensive experience. “In many cases it is not uncommon in a group of four or five SDF officers to find 100 plus years of military experience.”[41] According to survey results, responding SDFs primarily draw on such experience and professional backgrounds in offering medical, financial, and legal aid within the SDF and to the National Guard.

Only Texas, Virginia, and Indiana reported having an SDF naval or marine arm. The Texas, Virginia, and Vermont SDFs have air arms.Seven of the 13 SDFs reported that they trained and served side by side with the state National Guard on a regular basis. All 13 respondents responded that they conducted regular assessments of their SDFs.

In all, the survey data show that too many SDFs receive insufficient recognition and support. Because they are predominantly volunteer organizations, their capabilities tend to be overlooked. Yet the states with SDFs should seek to expand the size, scope, and utility of their SDFs to provide themselves with a dynamic resource at a low cost. High-risk states without SDFs should seriously consider forming them. In addition to receiving greater federal recognition and in-kind support as well as state resources, SDFs should be given the opportunity to train side by side with their National Guard counterparts. SDFs will be a significantly greater asset to their states if they are more professionally trained and equipped.

Expanding the Role of SDFs in Homeland SecurityIn 2009, the State Defense Force Improvement Act (H.R. 206) was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill would have amended Title 32 of the U.S. Code to enhance the nation’s SDFs.[42] The bill sought to clarify federal regulation of SDFs and to improve standardization and coordination with the DOD and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, since its introduction, H.R. 206 has been on hold.

Expansion and enhancement of SDFs remains vital to homeland security. To further such efforts, state leaders, Congress, the DOD, and the DHS should:Promote the creation of SDFs in high-risk states. Only 23 states and territories have SDFs. The hesitation of many governors makes little sense given that SDFs offer a low-cost force multiplier for homeland security efforts. In particular, the high-risk states without SDFs would greatly benefit from creating SDFs for disaster recovery and response efforts.Create state standards and clarify federal regulation. Clarifying federal regulation would provide a clearer picture on SDFs’ powers and mission. At the same time, creating state standards for tactics, techniques, and organization based on the needs of each individual state would strengthen and enhance SDF performance. State standards should be communicated to the Council of Governors and the State Guard Association of the United States to facilitate sharing of best practices among the states.

Incorporate SDFs into state and national emergency management plans. Expanding SDFs while clarifying regulation and setting standards is only the first step. The states, the DOD, and the DHS should ensure that SDFs are incorporated into existing and future emergency management plans and exercises. Including SDFs will help to ensure that all state and national actors in emergency response know their respective roles. Further, emergency management plans and exercises will provide SDFs with greater guidance on what is expected of them in the event of a man-made or natural disaster.

Permit SDFs to train side by side with the National Guard. While SDFs and the National Guard differ in their overall missions, they share emergency management responsibilities in their respective states. In each state, they also have a common commander, the state’s Adjutant General. Having the SDFs train alongside the state National Guards would be an effective use of resources and provide the specialized training needed to strengthen the SDFs. State Defense Forces will be a significantly greater asset to their states if they are more professionally trained and equipped. Accordingly, Congress should amend the law to allow the National Guard to provide assistance to all auxiliary forces, including SDFs and Coast Guard Auxiliaries.[43] This assistance could include technical training, administrative support, and use of National Guard facilities and equipment.

Encourage greater state support and resource allocation, and federal in-kind support. Four of the 13 SDFs do not receive state funding. While SDFs are a low-cost resource, the size and scope of their functionality is hindered by insufficient support and resources. To increase the quality and capability of SDFs, states need to provide adequate support and resources. Additionally, while SDFs should remain solely funded by the states, these forces would greatly benefit from receiving federal in-kind support from the Department of Defense. Allowing SDF members to train at military facilities and to receive excess federal equipment and supplies would greatly benefit the SDFs with minimal burden on the DOD.

The Future of the Modern MilitiaThere are clear historical, legal, and practical justifications for strengthening the State Defense Forces. Since the founding of this country, militias have played a vital role in fulfilling the constitutional duty of providing for the common defense. Today, as strictly state forces, SDFs continue to provide critical manpower at minimal cost.Despite the undeniable benefits from having an effective SDF, many SDFs lack the resources and the operational standards needed to make them more effective. Some states at high risk of natural or man-made disasters have not even formed SDFs. The U.S. and its states can no longer afford to sideline these national security assets.

—James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Deputy Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and Director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, a division of the Davis Institute, at The Heritage Foundation. Jessica Zuckerman is a Research Assistant in the Allison Center.

The BBC has an article up on the gun-smuggling from the US to Mexico. In typically one-sided fashion, it mentions that guns seized from narcos in Mexico are often traced back to the United States, and that the ATF isn’t effectively fighting this problem.

For those without much knowledge on the subject, it gives the impression that there’s a flood of illegal guns being bought in the US across the counter legally, and then shipped into Mexico to fuel the gun crime there–blaming our “lax gun laws” for Mexico’s narco turf war violence.

First of all, let’s point out that Mexico has a narco problem because the US has a hard-on for drug prohibition, not because Americans can buy guns legally. I’ve often read that canard about drug buyers financing drug crime with their purchases, but the simple twofold truth is that a.) people will always desire and buy mind-altering substances, no matter what the law says, and b.) the War on Drugs serves as a price control mechanism and profit guarantee for dealers and traffickers.

Second, let’s look at that article a little more closely. The picture that accompanies it shows a bunch of 40mm grenade launchers along with ammunition. Looking at that, your average BBC reader could be lead to believe that those things are legal to buy and own freely in the US, and that they originated at a US gun show or gun store. Grenade launchers are, of course, illegal to own, purchase, or sell in the United States without a special registration and tax stamp. Grenade launchers are tightly controlled “destructive devices”, as is their ammunition. (Every single 40mm grenade is also classified as a DD, and subject to a $200 transfer tax per round. Each grenade must be individually registered with the BATFE, which makes them super-expensive and very rare to find in civilian hands.) Considering the difficulty and expense of obtaining a launcher and the ammo for it, never mind the fact that every single launcher and round is registered to an owner with the ATF, I guarantee that the 40mm launchers in that picture came not from the US, but from Mexican military armories.

Third, the language in the article isn’t quite misleading, but it omits a few facts. We are told that “the majority of guns confiscated by Mexico and submitted to the ATF for tracing do originate in the US <emphasis mine>.” What it doesn’t mention is that the majority of guns seized from Mexican narcos do not originate in the US. The Mexican Federales do not submit most of their seized guns to the ATF for tracing because they know their provenance already. Mexico uses a licensed version of the H&K G36 assault rifle, for example, and whenever one of those shows up, they know it didn’t walk out of a gun store in San Antonio. (They also use the licensed version of the H&K 40mm grenade launcher, which happens to look exactly like the weapon in the center of the picture.) So they only send the serial numbers of the non-domestic guns to the ATF, which is the minority of seized weapons. Reading the article over a quick latte, one could however get the impression that most of the crime guns in Mexico are traced back to the US, because they omit that information.

Lastly, even those guns that were bought in the US and then smuggled into Mexico for use by narcos didn’t get sold to Mexican nationals legally. Gun shops have to run federal background checks on every single gun purchase, and foreign nationals, with few exceptions, are not eligible to buy firearms in the United States. If a rifle made it from a legal buyer into the hands of a Mexican criminal, the person buying the rifle and then handing it to said criminal broke federal law. (Buying a gun for a non-eligible person is called a “straw sale”, and will get you ten years in Club Fed.)

Mexico has plenty of problems, but corruption (where and how do you think the narcos get Mexican military hardware?) and the economic incentives created by drug prohibition make up the lion’s share of those, not legal gun sales in the United States. You want to curb the flow of guns and stop the violence in Mexico, you stop guaranteeing those dealers and traffickers a 10,000% profit margin on some powdered plant product. Drug dealers don’t care about cocaine or “poisoning America’s children”, they care about profit. If you held a voter referendum on keeping or tossing drug prohibition, all the drug dealers in the country would vote to keep them illegal. Take away their price control system, and they’ll go the way of the booze runners of the Prohibition era.

But nobody’s going to do that, of course. Between asset forfeiture, inability to learn from the Prohibition, the suitability of drug laws to curb inconvenient liberties, and the millions on the payroll of drug task forces and agencies nationwide, that wouldn’t be good business. And civil liberties continue to take it in the pants.

Remember: a vote for drug prohibition is a vote for gun control. Without illicit substance turf wars, we wouldn’t even have NFA ’34, GCA ’68, or the 1994 Crime Bill. We wouldn’t have asset forfeiture, RICO, or any of the many other onerous laws that shackle our movements and make a mockery of the Bill of Rights. But point that out to a self-righteous dope prohibitionist, and you get the old saw about the damage drugs can do, and do you want to see schoolchildren legally light up crack pipes in front of the CVS at eight in the morning? It’s the same kind of arrogant paternalism that the gun banners display when they talk about how blood would flow in the streets if we removed all the restrictions on gun ownership and carry. “Well, I know that I wouldn’t abuse them, but I’m damned sure those peasants all around me couldn’t handle the liberty…”

"The First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrong-headed views. The Second Amendment is no different. Like the First, it is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people... And whatever else it leaves to future evaluation, it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home."

"The First Amendment contains the freedom-of-speech guarantee that the people ratified, which included exceptions for obscenity, libel, and disclosure of state secrets, but not for the expression of extremely unpopular and wrong-headed views. The Second Amendment is no different. Like the First, it is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people... And whatever else it leaves to future evaluation, it surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home."

As the body count in the Mexican drug wars mounts beyond 30,000, federal authorities have tracked more than 60,000 guns in the past four years back across the border to American dealers. Congress, enthralled with the gun lobby, has done nothing about a legal loophole increasingly at the heart of the carnage — the dealers’ freedom to make multiple sales of AK-47s and other battlefield assault rifles without having to report to federal authorities, as the law requires for handgun sales.

No wonder one dealer felt free to sell 14 AK-47s to one trafficker in a single day.

The gun lobby previously convinced an obeisant Congress that “long guns” like military rifles and shotguns were not favored by criminals and deserved a pass at dealers supposedly catering to sportsmen. But the drug war toll is proving otherwise, with use of high- power long guns more than doubling in the past five years as cartel gunmen turn to the rat-a-tat annihilators easily obtainable across the border.

A big reason for that preference is the failure to require reports on multiple rifle sales, according to a new inspector general’s report at the Justice Department. In Texas, the traffic is white hot. Eight of the top 12 dealers in Mexican crime guns are nestled profitably near the border, according to The Washington Post, which spent a year penetrating some of the data secrecy that Congress has enacted to protect the gun industry.

With a more Republican Congress in the wings and Democratic lawmakers openly fearful of the gun lobby’s political clout, there is no expectation of courageous legislating to close the loophole. But executive order is another possibility. It has enough traction lately among Justice Department officials to prompt a “grass-roots alert” by the National Rifle Association to its four million members, according to The Post.

It is hard to believe that most ordinary N.R.A. members would not agree something must be done about the cross-border sale of war weapons that underpins the drug scourge. If it takes an executive order to cut the carnage, President Obama should not hesitate.

The "AK-47s" you can buy in the US are strictly semi-automatic, meaning one trigger pull is required for every shot. Given the global arms markets are full of the real select fire versions produced by Russia, China and others, I can't imagine there is much demand for the more expensive, not full auto-capable US AK.

As noted in many press accounts of the warfare in Mexico, the narcos are often armed with full auto- belt fed machine guns, RPGs and hand grenades. None of which can be lawfully purchased at the typical gun store in the US.

There are already federal laws on the books about straw purchases (buying guns for another person who cannot legally purchase/own a firearm) and federal laws on the export of weapons. The BATFE already investigates and charges people engaging in illegal weapons purchases and exports.

If Mexico is so concerned about weapons from El Norte, perhaps they should secure that border, like they do their southern border and build a fence.

Woof, If a gundealer is illegally selling guns then prosecute them, if you want to stop the money coming in and the guns going out seal the F'in border. There is no loophole to be closed here, anyone buying a weapon of any kind from a dealer has to go through a F.B.I. background check. If someone is making straw purchases, that is illegal, investagate and prosecute, enforce the laws on the books. This is just the latest excuse for going after our gun rights. This is typical of the Left, blame the rights of America's lawabiding citizens for the 30,000 deaths in Mexico when most of the arms being used come from Mexico's own police and military. Nice. And the NYT needs to check some facts.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War#Sources_of_weapons P.C.

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms... disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man." --Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishment, quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book

Woof GM, Yep nice weapons, I prefer the 40. cal's, the Glock 35 and the G27. Having a Lone Wolf 9mm barrel that drops in to replace the 40. barrel is nice also. Of course I'm still partial to my Springfield Armory 45 P.C.